Namlok04
Member
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
- Messages
- 34
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- 91
Im not defending Atlanta PD on how this was handled at the time, but you have to remember Atlanta has been a high crime area for a long time, and up until then had handled its own cases.
On top of this case was also dealing with a rash of other murders, rapes, robberies, drugs, assaults, missing persons, burglaries, and everything else at the time not associated with the ATKID case.
Serial crime can be extremely hard to solve as it is , but its even exponentially more so when they are hidden among some 75-100 other murder cases alone on top of everything else.
This was LONG before departments started sharing info and asking for help from each other.
In the ATKID case, you are looking at 28 + murders, that means there could in theory be at least 28 offenders but in this case, at least 3 but possibly as many as 5 serial killers could be working the same area.
Not all of them are serial killings, some of these were robberies that went wrong, some were street beefs, some were rapes , 1 could be a filicidal murder, and thats just some of the child victims.
Add into that now a possible KKK connection and then add into that the adults now you have even more of a dynamic to work with.
SO again Im not defending APD, but I understand what its like in a large metropolitan PD, and these were not the only things they were dealing with at the time.
Agreed. It's a lot of work to take on for one department in a densely populated area, and with all those high crime rates. I meant more how the department handled their cases after the arrest and conviction of WW. Even though some of those cases (I think based on fibers it was 5-8?) were connected by latent evidence to him, those twenty some other cases should not have been closed until we had a definitive answer and/or unsub(s) in custody.
I still have hopes that even today, we're able to find answers for the families.
I know the main task of police is to try to solve the crime after it's happened- so why aren't there more cold case units?
(I'm sure I could speculate; lack of funds, not enough bodies, not enough leads, etc) But I think of cases like Deborah Sue Williamson - where the sheriff outright told their family that they're not actively investigating her case anymore.
I'm not trying to paint LE in a negative light, I think we can all agree that it needs some tweaking, I just hope that they're now able to use all of today's technological advances to their advantage to put the right people away.